Campaigner Donald Trump made considerable noise about being a champion of the little guy, so it is disappointing to see President Trump working against the interests of the common man and woman — in relative quiet in this instance.

Recently Trump signed an executive order seeking a review of the “fiduciary rule,” which was approved during the Obama administration and was to go into effect in April. Observers think the review will lead to its demise, unfortunately.

Something called the fiduciary rule will never send people rushing to the ramparts, but its importance should not be overlooked. According to The New York Times, it “would have forced financial professionals to act in customers’ best interest when giving them advice about their retirement accounts.” Without the fiduciary rule, stockbrokers, registered investment advisers and insurance agents could direct investors to options that meet a lower standard — coincidentally with higher commissions and fees.

Gary Cohn, the director of the National Economic Council, and former Goldman Sachs executive, has called the fiduciary rule a “bad rule’’ that restricts choice, likening it to requiring restaurants to put only healthy food on the menu. However, more is at stake with retirement accounts than consuming an occasional deep-fried onion. The truth is that many retirees lack the financial sophistication to assess risk and opaque fees, and with traditional pensions fading away, they cannot afford to lose out.

John D. Bogle, founder and former chief executive of the Vanguard Group investment company, called the possible demise of the fiduciary rule “a step backward for our nation, allowing Wall Street to continue to profit by providing conflicted advice at the expense of working Americans saving for retirement.” One estimate is that scuttling the rule will result in $20 billion more in revenues for the financial industry by 2020, with that money coming out of investors’ pockets.

Bogle argues that most small investors would be better served by low-cost, diversified index funds. Champions of that approach can point to another recent Times story, which pointed out that tiny Houghton College in western New York, with a $46.4 million endowment, easily outdistanced Harvard University — with its massive $35.7 billion endowment — in returns in the last fiscal year. The score, for those keeping balance sheets at home: Houghton, 11.85 percent in the black, Harvard, minus 2 in the red. Houghton has gotten out of hedge funds and alternative investments, while giant Harvard is deeply invested in such. Likewise Dartmouth College, which had a return on investments of minus 1.9 percent in 2016.

Bogle and others have said that some brokerage firms have already embraced the fiduciary principle — putting clients first — in anticipation of a rule change. “It simply doesn’t seem like a good business practice for Wall Street to tell its client investors, ‘We put your interests second,’ ’’ he wrote.

But the Trump administration apparently has no such qualms. It may make loud claims about helping working people, but they better shut out the noise and read the fine print.